One small part of my main office bookshelf. Some really good books here, but few I’ve actually adopted for courses.

Every semester, the textbook challenge rises again.

Does a specific course really need a textbook?

Is there such a thing as a truly up-to-date print textbook on a media-related topic?

Could we get by entirely or mostly on freely available/library-accessible online readings, tutorials, MOOC segments and other bits of vetted content?

Why are there still no online, interactive services to teach some of these topics (e.g., grammar, AP style) more effectively for individual learners than an expensive textbook can, either for free or at an affordable cost? I haven’t yet found one that is truly reliable (i.e., doesn’t crash or otherwise lose students’ work) and that would ideally interface nicely with Blackboard, our campus’ LMS.

If I do select a print textbook, which design is best: one that is eye-catching and scattered, filled with colorful graphics, listicles and sidebars on every page; or one that is more traditional, focused and dense? The former seems like it’s meant for today’s reader, and yet I hear some students say that style is distracting and lacks cohesion; the latter looks boring, but may be more informative and present concepts more deeply.

Behold: my new notebook, a.k.a. a “Decomposition Book.” Yes, it has cute farm animals on it. I particularly like the inquisitive lamb at bottom left.

I have been struggling lately to find a method of capturing the little things that intrigue me in everyday life. I know that some of these factoids and concepts could coalesce into bigger ideas; but I find that taking photos of things with my phone or saving them into Evernote reduces them to just another few bytes amidst all the jetsam of my digital life.

And so, a notebook. No app seemed suited to the task. The closest options seemed to be Day One, a journaling app, and Inkflow, a more unstructured journal/book app that allows the inclusion of more photos and of handwriting. (Photos are still my major point of discontentment about using a notebook. I record so many things visually now. I need a teeny printer that prints photos onto super sticky notes so I can put them in the notebook. Hmm.)

My desire to keep a record of more random ideas/observations comes from two sources.

First, one of the best things I learned about in graduate school: C. Wright Mills’ “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” (I delight in claiming Mills as a fellow Texan and Longhorn!)

His advice to maintain a “file” to collect ideas, notes, observations, and theories as they develop has always stuck with me. I have several such digital locations, but I rarely revisit them. It’s much harder to flip through a bunch of random notes, PDFs, and websites than to recline with a notebook and open it to a random page to find or record inspiration.

Mills explains the purpose, structure, and use of the file at length in the essay. Here’s a short excerpt, but the whole thing is worth reading:

You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organize their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experiences is that, in the course of a lifetime, modern man has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet to be skeptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature workman. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence.

By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot `keep your hand in’ if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression. To maintain a file is to engage in the controlled experience.

Second, and from a more poetic perspective: One of my Linfield College colleagues, the wonderful novelist Anna Keesey, spoke recently on campus about some of her habits of mind and her approach to storytelling. She described herself as having a “magpie mind,” after the bird that collects delightful objects in its nest. Anna said that she, too, collects objects of fascination, which later manifest in her creative work.

Magpie, a.k.a. Pica pica. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t foresee that my little Decomposition Book will yield anything as great as what Anna or C. Wright Mills have produced, but my own inner magpie will enjoy collecting and thinking on my own collection of intriguing objects.

Yet another goofy Photoshop mashup by me. I am exhausting the Internet’s stock of CC-licensed photos of magazines.

I have a new(ish) post at PBS MediaShift that also represents my first foray into non-scholarly data visualization.

I really enjoyed trying out a number of tools before settling on Silk.co for these visualizations of the most recent Magazine Media 360° report, which presents the most recent audience data across platforms for about 145 magazines. The data have always looked a bit odd to me, so I wanted to dig deeper into them and see what’s really going on.

Here’s one of the visualizations, showing the change in audience for these magazines’ print/digital editions in the last year (blue) and their total change in audience across all platforms (green).

In addition to serving as the foundation for this story, the visualizations provide a window into intriguing possibilities for future stories. Allrecipes, Wired, and, well, Playboy all look like they might be doing some interesting things with their online publishing strategies.

I found this project to be really fascinating (and fun, for a social science data geek). I can’t wait to introduce my Multimedia Storytelling students to data journalism in the coming weeks.

Photo remix with images by Open Clips (graph) and Michael Zimmerman (magazines), both via Pixabay and used under Creative Commons license.

I have a new post up at PBS MediaShift that offers a different perspective on the “Netflix for magazines” (a.k.a., “buffet-style”) business model offered by Readly and Magzter, among other companies. I wanted to hear from these companies about why they think they can succeed with this approach.

The two things I found most curious in reporting this story:

From my conversation with Blake Pollard at Readly: “We have tried to go away from being a reading app to make it more of a utility, using trusted content that’s in magazines.” I don’t think anyone has explored this aspect of these apps — that they could be considered filtering tools, offering people a way to locate higher-quality niche content than they can find with a Google search. Whether that filtering/utility role is worth $9.99/month…well, that remains to be seen, I suppose.

The differing strength of print culture — though almost universally waning — in various locales and how users’ preferences/habits affect their level of comfort with digital simulacra. If you’re still very much a print reader, a magazine’s digital replica probably seems more familiar and comfortable than if you’ve been immersed in mobile and interactive media for a decade now. Maybe there is still a role for replicas, as unsatisfying as they are for many in this latter group of users.

It was this little moment in media where everyone thought the future of media was the audio slideshow. I was hired by The New York Times to make audio slideshows and to teach other people how to do that. I would make over 50 audio slideshows a year, I trained like 200 people on audio recording. I really spent the first 12 months of my existence doing that.

Then, of course, it became clear to me that the future of journalism was not, in fact, audio slideshows.

I’ve been haunted by this quote all semester as I’ve prepped my new Multimedia Storytelling class. One of the assignments is — you guessed it — an audio slideshow.

This course is an introduction to various modes of digital media storytelling, including social media, photos, audio, video, and data, plus a tiny bit of coding. It’s a lot to cover in one semester, though our focus on story, as opposed to technical detail in each medium, makes it somewhat more doable. To avoid requiring an assignment every week, I came up with ways to combine the code and social media topics into one assignment, and a way to combine audio and photography (yep, the audio slideshow).

I know audio slideshows certainly aren’t all the rage now. But I think it’s still a useful starter task that helps students think about how well-chosen, varied, thoughtfully arranged photos can tell a story, and the addition of good interview and natural sound enhances the viewer’s experience. This assignment will also be a good preview of concepts they need for video storytelling, which comes up next in our course.

A significant challenge has been identifying the best software for students to use to create their slideshows. Soundslides used to be the standard, I think, but Flash is an issue now. I also want the students to be able to export their finished projects as videos for YouTube or Vimeo, which will make it possible for them to use the videos on their personal websites or portfolios (e.g., on WordPress.com, which many of them use).

We’ve settled for now on iMovie (pre-installed on students’ Macs and on our lab computers) or Picasa (free for PC or Mac). iMovie is probably going to be easier to use, as Picasa requires a ready-made MP3 for the audio that cannot be edited once it’s imported into the slideshow, and photos are all displayed for an equal amount of time (basically audio length / number of photos = the duration for each photo). iMovie allows a little more flexibility.

Our class doesn’t incorporate step-by-step software instruction, given our priority on understanding story over software. So, students will mostly figure the software out on their own. Luckily, both iMovie and Picasa are pretty easy to use. I’ve made screencasts for the entire slideshow process in Picasa (I love you, Screencast-O-Matic), but with so many different versions of iMovie potentially in use (including two on our own lab computers, for some reason), I have just provided them with links to decent tutorials and screencasts for iMovie 9, 10, and 11.

Even though slideshows probably aren’t the future of journalism, I think there’s still going to be value in this assignment for our students. I’ll let you know how it goes!

One of my tasks as the instructor of this spring’s Senior Capstone course is rounding up online locations and services where my 15 students can publish their final projects. (I’m also working on them with portfolios, and have blogged about those options before.) Most students’ projects emphasize creating long-form writing, video, and/or audio, as opposed to hand-coding complex presentations for content themselves.

One of our challenges, then, is finding places that make publishing these projects possible with a minimum of effort and code. I hope to help students get their work out there in a way that suits their production choices, is visually appealing and interactive, and that at least approximates some of the gorgeous interfaces professionals use today. Oh, and either for free or a very low cost!

I’ve compiled an initial list of services the students and I are checking out. I’d love to hear more about what others have used in their classes — and to add your examples of projects on these various platforms.

Self-hosted WordPress (some cool themes for stories, perhaps: Elite, OneEngine; some students may use WordPress.com, but I’m encouraging a shift to self-hosted to enable more features and to build familiarity with WP)

Wix (one of last year’s seniors, Sara Miller, created her project with Wix)

I wish I had time to really experiment with all of these, but alas, that’s not the case. So, please share your experiences with these platforms in the comments, and feel free to post links to examples of finished projects, too! I’ll update the post with your feedback.

I was recently asked to give a short teaching presentation of a teaching technique or tool for our Faculty Teaching and Learning Lunch series here at Linfield. I imagine folks are going to be somewhat surprised that I’m not presenting on something that involves technology; instead, I’m going to talk about my many uses of index cards — low tech but effective!

I think my students have come to find my multipurpose uses of index cards somewhat amusing. After having purchased many index cards myself, I finally asked this semester’s students in each of my classes to purchase a pack of 3″ x 5″ cards along with their textbooks, and to bring some to every class session. Because I use lots of active learning techniques in my classes, it’s nice to have every student equipped with these cards for whatever activity I dream up, especially for spontaneous decisions to use one of the techniques below in class.

Why use 3″ x 5″ index cards specifically?

They’re small and easy to handle. I can sort and flip through them quickly to look at students’ responses.

They’re easier to make into rows and piles than sheets of paper.

Their size limits the length of student responses to quiz-type questions or quick writes, making these more focused and easier to read and/or grade.

They communicate “low-stakes activity” to students in a way that the instruction “Take out a sheet of paper” does not, reducing the anxiety caused by asking students to write on the spot in class.

Cards used for planned activities are easier to reuse each semester because they are more durable than slips of paper and don’t have to be reprinted and recut every time.

Here’s a list of the various ways I’ve used index cards in the classroom. Many of these I’ve adapted from teaching books, colleagues, online activities, etc., so I hesitate to claim that any is entirely original — but they have all worked for me in different contexts and courses.

Some possibilities:

Drawing student names or group numbers at random for participation in discussion, activities, presentations, etc.;

Answering questions, including:

“Daily questions” or brief quizzes at the beginning of class that can then be clarified and discussed (or simply graded);

“Quick writes” during class that can be easily shared with me, a classmate, a small group, or the whole class, either by turning them in, exchanging them with each other, and/or discussing them at the time (similar to a think-pair-share); and

End-of-class questions about things that were still unclear and/or that should be discussed next class;

(all of these can be anonymously submitted, if that’s preferable for the desired outcome);

Completing anonymous mid-semester or post-activity feedback questions (I often ask for “something going well in our class” and “something that could be improved” on each side of the card), which are easy to sort into piles to identify common student concerns;

Creating games where teams have to write a correct answer on a card (e.g., for grammar games in my writing class);

Assigning topics to specific small groups during a class activity (works well in a big class where cards can be passed out quickly, rather than talking to each group about which topic they should address);

Having students construct models of things (e.g., in my Research Methods class, making crosstabulations by hand, laying out experimental designs); and

Having students arrange ideas/examples/topics/events/steps in a process into appropriate groupings or orders.

Another advantage: Students’ responses to various tasks, if written on cards in this way, are easy to display on a document camera for quick comparison and contrast. For example, I’ve had students in my writing class write out drafts of news story leads on index cards, and then I arrange them below the document camera for side-by-side comparison and discussion of students’ different approaches to the task. This is easier than comparing text they’ve written on our lab computers or (at least until better collaboration/display apps are developed) on our iPads. Many of the classroom games I’ve developed also result in the class’s discussion of their responses with the help of the document camera.

In this activity, students made a crosstabulation that reflected the results of a brief in-class content analysis of our campus newspaper. (We used stickies, too!)

Constructing sets of cards for these different activities can be time-consuming or easy, depending on the complexity of the activity. (The sets I created for experimental design were some of the more complicated ones, for example.)

Most of the sets of cards I’ve created have been fairly easy to make by hand, usually using nice bold markers, but it would also be possible — particularly for large classes — to print labels to stick onto cards, or to try these printable index cards (though they’re expensive, so you’d definitely want those to be reusable). You could also have the students create the cards themselves in class, if time permits. After we finish an activity, I ask students to carefully reassemble whatever cards I’ve provided them so we don’t lose parts of the sets. I keep the sets together in envelopes.

And, for the office supply fans among us: You can even get creative with colored index cards! Use colors to indicate different small group assignments or topics. Colored cards are useful to guide group formation and re-formation in a jigsaw activity (write numbers on the cards to form the first groups, then re-form the groups by card color for the second round).

Do you have other creative ways to use index cards in the classroom? Please share them in the comments!

Perhaps I am overly fascinated by productivity- and creativity-inducing tricks. I know I tend to post about such topics quite a bit. But I like experimenting on my own work habits to see what helps me enjoy my work more, or at least get it done more quickly. I am my own research subject.

One thing I tried today while writing a research paper was doing Pomodoros with a twist — literally. I stood up, grabbed my drop spindle, and spun yarn for five minutes during each break. (I also got a new, free Pomodoro app and used Anti-Social today. Sometimes I need a lot of help to get work done, it seems.)

I read yet another article on the risks of sedentary work (something I’ve been trying to combat already with my treadmill laptop attachment and my standing desk in the office). At home, though, I only have a regular desk…and I have a hard time doing in-depth writing and revision on the treadmill. It’s better for basic tasks, like email and web surfing, for me. (I think the reason may be related to the challenge of typing on the laptop in that configuration — considering Clive Thompson’s recent article on typing and writing…)

So: drop spindle spinning breaks! A new incentive to take breaks, stand up, and maybe enhance the energy I bring to the work when it’s time to get back to it.

From a Flickr search for “data.” Things I can use on the blog, but not on MediaShift! Photo from JD Hancock

I have two new posts up at PBS MediaShift: one on the integration of multimedia production into magazine production processes (which finally seems to have become a more natural part of the workflow), and a second sort-of-follow-up piece on how magazines know when their multimedia works…analytics!

The use of analytics to refine digital magazine content is really fascinating. As I mention in the story, print magazine editors have no such source of insight into whether and how readers are engaging with their content, and have to rely on limited forms of reader feedback, research, and their own intuition. Those tools worked pretty well for a while, but — for digital content — the availability of analytics data certainly offers a whole new variety of opportunities.

I’d be curious to find out about any magazines that make significant changes in their content after reviewing analytics data over a longer term. Or — if they choose not to do that … which would also be an option, I suppose, that prioritizes a reliance on their own intuition over the data.